Sleepaway Camp (1983) Review

Sleepaway Camp (1983) Review 

The golden era for slasher movies was between the late-70s and mid-80s, and Sleepaway Camp came out during the glut of them. Ricky and his shy, quiet cousin Angela go to Camp Arawak for the summer, but mysterious accidents and deaths keep occurring, making everyone nervous and suspicious. The campers are excessively mean to Angela, bullying her constantly, and the whole lot of them are just mean-spirited. The camp staff, too, are incompetent and loathsome. Early on, the chef tries to rape Angela, but he gets what’s coming to him before too long.  

Aside from the death scenes, there’s all the usual summer camp activities—swimming, baseball, overnight campouts, capture the flag—and we get to see them pretty extensively. It’s mostly filler, but never dwells on one thing for too long to the point of becoming tedious. Overall, the content is pretty familiar, especially if you’ve seen Friday the 13^th, which is copied quite closely, with an unseen killer stalking and killing campers, plus a twist ending. 

The characters are ordinary, the acting is amateur, and the production value is low. But this is a slasher movie, so none of that matters as much as the quality and quantity of the scares and nudity and violence! Well, there aren’t any boobs, and the on-screen blood and gore is moderate. Some of the kills aren’t shown, or are bloodless, and a few are dull, like a kid getting drowned, or bizarre and more comedic than scary, like when a camp counsellor gets locked in a bathroom stall and a beehive is put through the window on a stick, resulting in him getting stung to death. 

Sleepaway Camp doesn’t sound very good, does it? And yet, it’s actually kind of great. 

The mystery of who is killing everyone keeps it worth watching. There aren’t many hints as to who it is, aside from people recognizing the unseen assailant, so you know it’s someone from the camp. There are a couple potential suspects, but as the body count rises, it becomes pretty obvious. The reveal comes at the very end, and it is an undeniably disturbing, nightmare-inducing conclusion. There isn’t anything particularly scary throughout, but this ending is perhaps one of the scariest endings to any slasher movie. I don’t want to spoil it for those who have no idea what happens. I can’t possibly do it justice, anyway. You just have to see it. 

So despite being cheap and exploitative, I still recommend Sleepaway Camp to any and all horror fans. The ending kind of makes the whole thing worth it, but even putting the ending aside, there’s still something about the whole thing that’s appealing. It’s earned a cult following, and spawned several sequels, though I’ve yet to check any of them out. I mean, I like it, but not that much.